Postscript: Phife Dawg, 1970-2016

Phife Dawg of A Tribe Called Quest will be missed dearly by music lovers worldwide who identified with his humanness next to Q-Tip’s brilliant perfectionism and Ali Shaheed Muhammed’s otherworldly inaccessibility.

Photograph by Rodrigo Vaz / FilmMagic / Getty

“1988, senior year, Garvey High,” so the story goes. It’s an oldie but goodie. The lyric is from the 1991 song “Butter,” on which the rapper Phife Dawg fashions himself a ladies’ man with little concern for commitment before meeting a young woman who returns his ill treatment with her own indiscretions. The drums jangle like sleigh bells while Phife raps over a bright and hazy looping melody bent from the first few notes of “Young & Fine,” by Weather Report. Phife’s unmistakable timbre sounds barely pubescent even at twenty-one—and it’s all the more believable when telling a story as juvenile as that found on the deep cut from A Tribe Called Quest's seminal album, “The Low End Theory.” “I can’t front, thought I was all that, but now it seems I’ve met my match,” he offers, his masking braggadocio inching toward violence. Soon, he’s charging large swaths of women with various sins while nursing the wounds left by one: “Your whole appearance is a lie and it could never be true,” he digs, “and if you really liked yourself, then you would try to be you.”

For a song that so dreamily projects smoothness, “Butter” is jagged and biting in content, and in some moments, abusive. There is a palpable friction between Q-Tip’s slick witticisms—“not no Parkay, not no Margarine”—and Phife’s pugnacious slant and blunt delivery. The song captures the contrasts that made A Tribe Called Quest so potent as a musical group: soft and hard, slow and fast, love and hate. “ ‘Butter’ was one of the songs we argued about, because I wanted to be on it,” Q-Tip remembers in an interview with the music journalist Brian Coleman, revealing the song as one of their earliest productions born of conflict. “[Phife] had to fight for that one,” he adds, calling up the Tribe’s fractious history.

Formed in 1985 in school halls and studios across the sprawling neighborhoods of their native Queens, New York, A Tribe Called Quest was exhaustively dedicated to their pluralism. The group released just five albums, three canonical and two compromised by internal strife, all drunk on jazz and funk samples—sometimes three or four to a song, stacked and tucked among each other at all angles. Q-Tip, the group’s producer and central member, shunned the spotlight, while his rhyming partner Phife Dawg dodged work. The match fit better than either would admit.

The songs they’d write together transcended the rigid, one-dimensional imagery that continues to define the hip-hop genre—they rapped about the full spectrum of their experience—but much of Tribe’s output is mischaracterized as positive. In truth, even their most celebrated songs are confrontations, from their ringside shout demanding a shot at the belt on “Can I Kick It?” to sneaking a line as dismissive as “Relax yourself girl, please settle down” onto their most beloved hit, “Electric Relaxation.” It’s on this single that Phife delivers what’s probably his trademark bar: “Bust off on your couch, now you’ve got Seaman’s furniture.” Again, it’s typically vulgar, coquettish, satirical, vivid, sparse, and just whimsical enough that listeners wonder whether it was based on a true scene, and whether they could pull off the joke themselves. Tribe blissfully contradicted, and never explained. But they did fight.

Phife Dawg will be missed dearly by music lovers worldwide who identified with his humanness next to Q-Tip’s brilliant perfectionism and Ali Shaheed Muhammed’s otherworldly inaccessibility. He wasn’t the best rapper in the group at their onset, and worked to get better, with traceable results that improved everyone around him. There are few examples of perseverance and triumph in rap as pronounced as Phife’s, even before a bout with diabetes left him facing a much more dire challenge. He struggled with his health publicly through his mid-adulthood, though always maintaining his doughy humor and New York blend of nihilism-as-optimism.

Now, like Jam Master Jay of Run-D.M.C. and MCA of the Beastie Boys, Phife Dawg has rendered A Tribe Called Quest as immortal as they’d always appeared to be. Their conflicts and contradictions are unresolved, their catalogue is frozen, and their final performances are just that. But the songs will continue to unwind for generations of fans, specifically for how knotty and tangled they were, reflective of a group of young men that above all else refused to be defined—first as a novelty, and now as a legacy.